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(Beau “Cyclone” Simpson is trying to run through a idea with Tom “Iceman” Kazansky in his office)
Iceman: This is a terrible proposal. I’m not approving it.
Cyclone: I know but it’s the only thing I can think of that the top brass would let slide!
Iceman: No, Simpson.
Cyclone: Give me one good reason.
Iceman (glaring): Well first of all, it sounds like one of Maverick’s ideas, and secondly -
Cyclone (wincing): Hold it. That’s enough for me.
Zehavi F. Hooke
Housewarden and founder of Gallenautica. A maverick who lives by his own creed, with a flair for the dramatics that leads many to doubt his expertise. Some say his head is just barely bigger than his many ambitions.
Top Gun 2 & Propaganda
Okay. I’m gonna weigh in on this whole thing with my decidedly complicated feelings about the movie + the review thats been going around. Putting a read below here now with content warnings for Xenophobia, discussions of propaganda and generally informal-but-still-long-winded sociological/poli-sci analysis.
. . . this nineteenth-century, anti-Calvinist attitude of blissfully directing some cosmic Spirit to attend to our well-being still ubiquitously and insidiously trickles down to us through our modern obsession with goal-setting. Again, to be clear, there is little doubt that if a person lacks any motivation or engagement with his or her life, then focusing on a healthy target to reach may provide a useful spur. But goal-setting has become for many a way of life, synonymous with worthwhile achievement and personal progress. It starts when we are young: we choose these subjects for GCSE in order to study these ones at A level, in order to go to this university, to study this subject, to get this job, to get this promotion and work our way up this corporate ladder, to what? Meanwhile, our lives are relegated to something that happens, to borrow from Schopenhauer, ad interim: in the meantime; unattended. . . . We are told by self-styled self-help gurus and the folk wisdom down into which their proclamations have trickled, that we must clearly visualise for ourselves the specifics of a successful future and progress along the direct path towards those goals. Any number of books - with titles like Goals: How To Use Goal Setting To Get Everything You Want Fast and Goal Setting: Discover What You Want In Life And Achieve It Faster Than You Think Possible - offer to show you the simple secret formula for guaranteed success, and bring us close to [Rhonda] Byrne's misleading vision. Goals, we are told, are to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Targeted (S.M.A.R.T.). Once we have committed ourselves to such an ambition, and have found the route to achieving it, we can then move, sometimes Faster Than You Think Possible, to getting there. What on earth is wrong with that? A lot, I would suggest. Firstly, we tend to grossly misunderstand what will make us happy. . . . From a starting point of ignorance and misinformation, we commonly choose the wrong goals. Locked within our neat little stories of who we are and how we would like that story to continue, we aim for point on the horizon that advances the narrative in the direction we see fit. For some, it is to be a millionaire by a certain age. For others, to be the biggest and best at their job. Very commonly, these goals are driven by a vision of financial success that we aim to realise within the next few years or by a certain age. At all levels, the drive to achieve the brightest kind of success is seen as the most natural and robust path in life. . . . So we establish a goal, which may well be misguided, because we tend to make incorrect judgements about what makes us happy. What then? We now strive towards that specific, planned-out success, and her we encounter our second problem with the fetishising of goals. We invest too much and too specifically. If we stay true to our plan, we will need to sacrifice other aspects of our life to reach our intended destination. We forget that nothing happens in life independently of others. You may find yourself a partner and get married as intended but then suffer the loss of other dreams that you now regret abandoning. You may become a millionaire by thirty-five but at the expense of your personal relationships. The goal has proven too specific, too isolated; upon reaching your destination you realise with companionless regret that this solitary and lonely place was too remote and too much has been left behind. Or if the journey's end is not so lonely, or if success is reached without too much sacrifice, what then? The enjoyment of arrival is usually short-lived; the happiness envisioned and rehearsed for years is unlikely to last. Why? Because it does not arrive quite as satisfyingly as suspected; because we quickly get used to it; above all, because when on arrives one is still oneself, with whatever tendency towards dissatisfaction or restlessness that may bring. So what next? Set another goal? Other dreams have been forgotten; one must start anew. After we achieve our goals, we are forced to disidentify with them. . . . What if we fail? When the universe and fortune have not played according to our hopes, and we have sacrificed much to the pursuit of something that has now proved elusive, there is the double anxiety of humiliating failure and the same confusion as to what to do next. To avoid failure, the faith/self-blame process demands a constant renewal of investment. Blind faith in the desirability and achievability of the goal (and a fear of its collapse) has us abandon all sense in its pursuit. . . . Determined to retain a positive outlook, we remove naysayers from our lives, as the self-help industry instructs us. This may make for a proud slogan for social-media profiles - a snappy, self-assured 'Ignore the h8ters' - but it can be a dangerous folly. By removing or ignoring sources of honest feedback, we create a neat means of fuelling the downward spiral of self-deception. When we proudly denounce those who would undermine our self-belief, we emulate a model of strength we have been sold principally through the biographies of successful, strong entrepreneurs. We equate persistent commitment and the ability to laugh at one's detractors with a recipe for success. But this is a lie. We believe it because we are told it through many channels, but its source springs from a powerful select few who boast about their life stories as they perceive them. . . . These are overwhelmingly the self-serving rationalisations of people who, upon becoming successful, now wish to feel that they have rightfully earned their status and the respect of others. . . . The perpetual and overwhelming play of random chance is glossed over, and in its place a hero's journey is invented. And very often that story is one of adhering to a vision, no matter what, and having no time for those who would get in the way or did not share the hero's Herculean self-belief. This success story is a fiction. And we know it is a fiction, because it is also a recipe for failure. To persist with a belief in an end goal, to ignore the cries of others who tell you that your aspiration is unrealistic, to proudly commit yourself to a maverick scheme against all odds - this is the story of financial ruin far more often than it is one of success. . . . Many more will fail than succeed through blind self-belief. But we don't read books of entrepreneurial failure, only the triumphs, so we cannot learn from those tales of dogged self-belief anything of value. . . . Arthur Schopenhauer describes, I think, a more accurate dynamic, in his Counsels and Maxims: "Events and our chief aims can be in most cases compared to two forces that pull in different directions, their resultant diagonal being the course of our life." . . . The nineteenth-century philosopher is saying: you do not have the control over your life that you might like to believe. You will of course have certain aims, pulling you in one direction. However, life is constantly pulling back in the other. . . . Schopenhauer also uses the game of chess to give us another image of how our goal-setting might be unrealistic. When playing chess, we start out with a plan, but our plan is affected by the inclinations of the other player. Our plan must modify itself constantly, to the point that, as we carry it out, several of its fundamental features are unrecognisable. To stick blindly to the same goals would be to deny that a second, independent player was at the board.
Derren Brown, Goal-Setting in Happy
